I was on a solo backpacking day-ramble in the rolling lush late summer countryside around Monkton Wyld in Devon.
I came walking up from a wooded valley and saw this magnificent ancient Beech. It was too huge to photograph, but that didn’t occur to me.
I now think I must have gone into a minor trance of wonder and worship, a sort of falling in love at first sight, vegetable style!
In my mind’s eye, it’s there, just the bole of it, all sprouting out with thin new twiggy growth at the end of the season.
It is telling me my own story.
I was once upon a time also a new shoot, happy as the sunny day is long, knee-high to grasshoppers, under immense skies of early 1950s blue.
My height was under constant challenge from tall grasses, full grown corn, stands of giant stinging-nettles.
And of course those other, silent sentinals, the plain to see marvels of unlimited gigantism, the benign and welcoming upreach of the grand old elm trees where we lived near Aylesbury.
Today, I can equate looking up at the dark green remembered canopy, with my little boy self looking up at my own Mother
~ Love is present EveryNow
The View at 72+ 